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- 9546
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- any other being, or any cause, or any conceit. (For, does aught else
completely and unconditionally sacrifice itself for him? God's own sun
does not abate one tittle of its heat in July, however you swoon with
that heat in the sun. And if it _did_ abate its heat on your behalf,
then the wheat and the rye would not ripen; and so, for the incidental
benefit of one, a whole population would suffer.)
"A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable
earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly
excellence that their Creator intended for them. When they go to heaven,
it will be quite another thing. There, they can freely turn the left
cheek, because there the right cheek will never be smitten. There they
can freely give all to the poor, for _there_ there will be no poor to
give to. A due appreciation of this matter will do good to man. For,
hitherto, being authoritatively taught by his dogmatical teachers that
he must, while on earth, aim at heaven, and attain it, too, in all his
earthly acts, on pain of eternal wrath; and finding by experience that
this is utterly impossible; in his despair, he is too apt to run clean
away into all manner of moral abandonment, self-deceit, and hypocrisy
(cloaked, however, mostly under an aspect of the most respectable
devotion); or else he openly runs, like a mad dog, into atheism.
Whereas, let men be taught those Chronometricals and Horologicals, and
while still retaining every common-sense incentive to whatever of virtue
be practicable and desirable, and having these incentives strengthened,
too, by the consciousness of powers to attain their mark; then there
would be an end to that fatal despair of becoming at all good, which has
too often proved the vice-producing result in many minds of the
undiluted chronometrical doctrines hitherto taught to mankind. But if
any man say, that such a doctrine as this I lay down is false, is
impious; I would charitably refer that man to the history of Christendom
for the last 1800 years; and ask him, whether, in spite of all the
maxims of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence,
wrong, and iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the
world's story? Therefore, it follows, that so far as practical results
are concerned--regarded in a purely earthly light--the only great
original moral doctrine of Christianity (_i. e._ the chronometrical
gratuitous return of good for evil, as distinguished from the
horological forgiveness of injuries taught by some of the Pagan
philosophers), has been found (horologically) a false one; because after
1800 years' inculcation from tens of thousands of pulpits, it has proved
entirely impracticable.
"I but lay down, then, what the best mortal men do daily practice; and
what all really wicked men are very far removed from. I present
consolation to the earnest man, who, among all his human frailties, is
still agonizingly conscious of the beauty of chronometrical excellence.
I hold up a practicable virtue to the vicious; and interfere not with
the eternal truth, that, sooner or later, in all cases, downright vice
is downright woe.
"Moreover: if----"
But here the pamphlet was torn, and came to a most untidy termination.
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